On January 21, 2025, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) passed a new law that is inspired by and mirrors an Israeli law passed in 1986 prohibiting denial of the Holocaust. The law criminalizes the denial, diminishing, or celebration of the October 7, 2023, attack carried out by Hamas against Israel and carries a very harsh penalty of five years’ imprisonment. “Anyone who says or writes things denying the October 7 massacre with the intention of defending the terrorist organization Hamas and its partners, expressing sympathy for them, or identifying with them, will be sentenced to five years in jail,”1 it states.

As stated on the Knesset website, this law was passed on the basis of an existing law prohibiting Holocaust denial.2 A noteworthy difference, however, is that the prohibition of Holocaust denial was passed in 1986, 41 years after the Holocaust, providing ample time for governments and international organizations to investigate the events and legally define the Holocaust as a systemized, calculated genocide against Jews in Europe.3 Additionally, enough years had passed by then to evaluate global and local discourse on the Holocaust and to assess the implications of its denial on the integrity of historical truths—the Knesset’s alleged primary concern in passing this law.4

Contrastingly, this new law was introduced in early 2024—only months after the attacks occurred—and was passed merely a year later. The introduction of the law in early 2024 preceded any crystallization of a global or local discourse on the attack as well as any investigative efforts by international organizations such as the International Court of Justice, which deemed Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian Territories (oPT) illegal,5 or the International Criminal Court’s arrest orders for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.6

Denial, diminishing, and celebration of the October 7 events can take various forms. In the legal system specifically, precise language is required to properly determine what these actions could look like. The law details that a person will be charged if they “publish a statement denying the October 7 massacre with the intent of defending the Hamas terrorist organization and its partners or expressing sympathy or identification with them.”7

The keywords are intent, empathy, and identification. These words expand the legal gray area on which Israel operates to limit freedom of speech and further criminalize political dissenters. The words’ vagueness in legal contexts facilitates Israel’s increasingly narrowing tolerance of government criticism. In the past year only, Israel has used “identification with terrorist organizations” as grounds for indictments in three new laws.

Legal vagueness is fertile soil for applying subjectivity in defining “intent, empathy, and identification.” Intent is considered the most difficult thing to prove in criminal law, as it is a state of mind with which an act is committed.8 The indictment of this offense will be made by the attorney general of Israel, giving him or her the full authority to apply their subjective, not legally articulated, definitions of the terms. The attorney general is appointed through a vote in the parliament, but considering the Israeli Knesset’s growing extremism, this is bad news for Palestinians all over the oPT.